The Bamboo Project Blog

But Do They Work?

One of the big questions I'm frequently asked about using social media is whether or not the tools "work."  Depending on the questioner, this can mean a variety of things, but underlying everything is one issue--will my department or organization improve if we use social media?

Via Shel Holtz and Workplace Learning Today comes yet another "yes," to that question. Shel cites a brief published by the Aberdeen Group, titled Web 2.0, Talent Management, and Employee Engagement (a PDF file) that finds:

• 52% of organizations that adopt blogs, wikis, and social networking tools (among others) achieved best-in-class performance levels compared to 5% for those that didn’t.

• The same tools were used within organizations that achieved an 18% year-over-year improvement in employee engagement. Companies that didn’t use these tools grew engagement by a mere 1%. (An aside--not sure how "employee engagement" was measured).

• A 45% increase in spending on “software that links to networking site (e.g. Facebook or LinkedIn) or other communities of practice” as part of the recruiting process will increase internal recruiters’ ability to connect with potential recruits. These tools also let employees post messages to “lend a voice to the market on the work culture at a particular company.”

• Social networking is being used to connect newly-hired employees with mentors and coaches as well as build relationships with other employees. “In addition,” the brief notes, “blogs and wikis are also used as a means for a new employee to provide content/commentary on a topic at which he/she is an expert where others within the organization are struggling.” (Note--see my post last week on Lisa Johnson's keynote and the need to engage Millenials at work. This is what we're talking about here. I heard the same thing from the Gen Y folks at my Social Media Game workshop)

• 38% of organizations surveyed for an upcoming study from Aberdeen said the biggest growth in learning and development over the next year will come from “informal learning.” The investment these companies will make in blogs, social networks, and communities will “stimulate peer-to-peer learning and ideation, as well as facilitate communities of practice in which organizations can leverage the collective knowledge of their employees."

These findings echo what we saw in the eLearning Guild's 360 Report on eLearning 2.0 (webinar today, by the way). Those organizations that were making the greatest use of Web 2.0 technologies reported the strongest benefits, particularly in accommodating learner needs, increasing access to information and improving dissemination of information. As a result these organizations were increasing their investments in these technologies more than those organizations that had less experience with social media.

Pretty quickly the question isn't going to be "will the tools work?" but "how can we make them work for us?" Throwing up a wiki or a blog and hoping for the best isn't going to cut it. But doing it right can make some significant improvements to organizational effectiveness.

Jobs of the Future--Or Maybe For Today

Here's an interesting post from Ray Jimenez on the types of jobs he can see emerging as organizations begin to make greater use of Web 2.0 tools. At a minimum, these seem like functions that should be incorporated into someone's job description.

Some of the standouts for me included:

• PLE Assistants - Personal Learning Environments (PLE) - Downes, Sims and Kareer talk about the need of the connected learners to learn to work with the technologies to advance personal learning - easily said, but difficult for some to execute. The assistants coach learners on the possible choices and options on PLE decisions.

• Social Media Specialist - converts content into short, enticing, provocative, rapid, instant media with the likes of YouTube, e.g. CommonCrafts presentation and Institute of Social Research. (multimedia developers, audio and video developers, graphics and concept developers).

• Online Coach – uses video and audio conferencing, Instant Messaging, Twitter, tracking to support coaching roles. Learning coaches can help their clients by using Web 2.0 tools to continue communications and support. Twitter for example, helps in sharing small updates by using cell phones or PDAs.

• Social Network Catalyst – promotes, educates, processes, and nurtures the growth of networks - if you are one of those people that are adept or have the passion to help others improve relationships with Web 2.0 relations, you can be a catalyst. Catalysts grow, nurture, support and cajole networks to yield productive values.

• Social Network Analyst – is involved in metrics and research on performance of networks, learning and performance, using Web 2.0 to communicate the strengths and weaknesses of social networks and provide solutions. See Raytheon Professional Services.

Anybody seeing any of these jobs in their organizations? Is anyone thinking deliberately about building toward these kinds of functions or if they exist do they tend to evolve by accident? Do you see them as necessary?

UPDATE--In comments Marianne points us to a post she did on "personal information trainers" in libraries. Sounds like one to add to the list--or maybe it's a combo type position.

Flickr photo via tychay (I love those Moo cards)

How Much Hidden Talent is In Your Staff?

Paul Potts is a cell phone salesman in the UK. He's completely unassuming--bad teeth, a little overweight, not much of a dresser. The last person you'd imagine taking the stage as a serious contestant on Britain's Got Talent, the UK version of American Idol. But beneath that quiet exterior is a most amazing voice. It literally gave me chills to listen to him. And it made me wonder how much hidden talent is around us? How many people do we see on a daily basis--co-workers, supervisors, teammates--with hidden strengths we never see? How many people do we judge based on how they look or on our own preconceptions of what they should be doing? How many great talents do we miss in the process?

Here's the challenge for today. Try to find a Paul Potts in your organization. And then do something to nurture that talent.

More Support for a Results Oriented Work Environment

Some more support for the Results Oriented Work Environment I've been spouting off about lately. . .

Today's New York Times has an interesting article--Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent. It notes:

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

So how are we wasting all that time? Some say surfing the Net, but others point to the 5.6 hours per week we spend in worthless meetings, or the 1.5 hours per week we spend rifling through our desks looking for that report we KNOW is there somewhere. I'd argue that a fair amount of time is also spent fending off co-worker chit chat that is neither building team spirit nor leading to anything productive being accomplished.

Regardless, the article suggests that productivity is being measured by an old paradigm that is no longer workable in a knowledge worker economy:

Mr. Kustka assures me that the problem is not the three to four hours of concentrated work I do each day, but rather the outmoded paradigm against which I measure that work. Productivity was directly related to time back when Mr. Gilbreth was measuring things, he said, but the connection is less direct today.

“We are in a knowledge-worker world,” he says. “If you were building me a building, I could measure the number of bricks. If you were loading a truck, I could measure the number of boxes. But I can’t simply count your words. That doesn’t measure quality.” . . .

“The old thinking says ‘the longer it takes, the harder you’re working,” says Lynne Lancaster, a founder of BridgeWorks, a business consulting firm. “The new thinking is ‘if I know the job inside and out and I’m done faster than everyone else then why can’t I go home early?’

Which leads back to ROWE . . .

On a related note, go visit Shannon Turlington, who is running her own personal experiment in managing using ROWE. And via email, I found out that Rosetta Thurman's organization is also considering the concept as a way to deal with space issues in their organization. I'm curious to see how things go for them.

From Managing Transactions to Facilitating Transformations

Today I was in a strategic planning meeting with a number of business people. At one point, we were discussing the changing nature of providing healthcare services to aging baby boomers. The VP of HR for one of the local healthcare organizations was explaining to us that they are moving to more of a concierge approach to meeting healthcare needs, with a focus on relationships and amenities, similar to what you would find in hotels. She explained that baby boomers in particular have come to expect a different quality of experience from organizations with which they interact and that is influencing how her organization thinks about its business. Then she said something that I thought was incredibly profound.

"We're trying to move our organization from being transactional to being transformational."

I wrote that down in my notes and thought about it all the way home. Since then, the implications of that idea have been swimming around in my head. Here's what I think it means for nonprofits. (Warning--very ill-formed thoughts ahead)

A transaction occurs when a customer makes a request--for a service, a product, etc. and someone responds to that request. Most of what we do on a day-to-day basis is engage in a series of transactions with various customers, both internal and external. We focus on orders, purchases, changes, additions, transfers and the recordkeeping required to keep track of those transactions. In "well-run" organizations, we are constantly trying to keep these transactions humming along. We try to reduce errors, reduce the amount of time it takes to process a particular transaction, increase the number of transactions we are able to get through in a day and so on.

When we focus on transactions, we are paying attention to particular business processes and activities and how to make them run efficiently. This is a distinctly left-brained, logical approach to the work of an organization. It's not bad to focus on making transactions go smoothly and pleasantly. But the reality is that if we are just about performing various transactions, this is work that could be done by a computer or, eventually, a robot. And it would probably be done better, faster and more accurately. It's also work that is less meaningful to most people. Who wants to do work on a daily basis that could be done just as well by a kiosk?

So what would it mean for us to move from being transactional to being transformational? If we were transformational,

• We would be more holistic, thinking about the entire customer and their experiences with us over time, rather than their experience with us at a particular point in time.
• We would pay more attention to emotional issues and their impact on customers experiences. When we structure transactions to emphasize only efficiency or productivity, then we lose the "human touch" that really connects with people. This isn't to say that the human touch can only occur through face-to-face interactions, though. We can be more "human" even in our use of forms, the ways we communicate on our web sites and so forth.
  
• We would focus on creating particular experiences for customers, evoking new emotions and helping customers to think differently about themselves.  The VP at our meeting today explained that healthcare to this point has been about moving patients through various transactions--doctor's appointments, medical tests, treatments, etc. But now her organization is putting more of a focus on helping patients feel empowered to navigate their way through a menu of services that feel less like moving through an assembly line of healthcare and more like people taking charge of their lives. This is transformational because it helps people to see themselves differently in relation to their own healthcare and their own sense of agency in their lives.
• We would think bigger about what we do. To think about our organizations as being in the business of transformation means that we have to re-envision what we do. We have to think about what transformations we can help people achieve and how we can go about doing that. We have to back away from the day-to-day interactions for a while and think about the larger picture of what we hope to achieve (back to mission). Then we can look at how we structure our transactions and interactions with customers to achieve transformation.

This is one of those posts where I feel like I'm writing around something, rather than straight to it. I know in this very visceral way what I'm trying to say, but I'm not sure that I'm expressing it clearly or in ways that make sense. What I know is that the idea of moving from transactions to transformations is something that really appeals to me on a lot of levels. I think it would appeal to workers, too. When we talk about transformation, we're talking about work that has meaning. I don't think that we feel the same connection and sense of impact on the world when we see our work as a series of transactions. I think that both our customers and our employees want to feel that we're doing something that transforms.

I also see this as related to my thinking lately about ROWE. A results-oriented workplace requires us to have thought carefully about the results we are seeking. We need to consider those results, though, in light of whether or not we're going to be an organization that focuses primarily on transactions or one that focuses on transformations. Interestingly, one of the reasons that Best Buy is looking to implement ROWE in their stores is because they are moving to a more customer-centric, transformational view of the results they are seeking. True ROWE may require us to think far more carefully about results in terms of transformation at least as much as we think about transactions.

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Normally I would save this post in draft and let it marinate for awhile. But this time I'm posting it, raw and unformed, as I think that the only reason I end up saving some of these is because I want to polish them up and make them beautiful before I share them. Kind of stupid, though, when you consider that one of the beauties of working in the blogosphere is that other people will often help you transform that lump of coal into a diamond if you'll only let them.

A Results Oriented Work Environment is NOT the Same as Flexible Scheduling

Last week I asked if your nonprofit was ready to stop watching the clock in a post discussing Best Buy's Results-Oriented Work Environment (ROWE). As a quick recap, Best Buy is now allowing a significant portion of its employees to work from home or other locations and to work whatever hours they need in order to achieve clearly-defined work objectives. Face time is no longer considered a requirement of most jobs and they are even looking to roll out the concept in their retail stores.

When I wrote the post, one of the questions I asked was if there's a difference between ROWE and flexible scheduling. I've come to the conclusion that there is a major difference, one that gets to the heart of some fundamental beliefs that many organizations have about work.

At many organizations, a flexible schedule is worked out on a case-by-case basis to accommodate life situations that workers may face during their tenure with the organization. It's commonly used to ease women back into work following maternity leave, to provide an employee with time to care for a sick family member or because the employee is dealing with his/her own health problems. Regardless, it's generally a solution that organizations will consider for employees who are currently "not serious" about their jobs because other life issues are intervening.

In the minds of management, people who need a flexible schedule are people who are not putting work first. This means that they are less likely to be considered for promotions, special projects, etc. In many cases, asking for a flexible schedule that allows you to work from home and/or to work "non-traditional" hours is a fast road to a career dead end.

ROWE is a completely different animal. Best Buy is starting from the premise that ALL workers would benefit from having the flexibility to get work done wherever and whenever it makes the most sense for them to do it. They are not assuming that people who want to work from Starbucks or from a den in their homes are trying to shirk work. They are assuming that these are people who are deadly serious about their own performance and are adult enough to know when they need an optimum environment for getting that work done.

While the content of flexible schedules is the same in both types of organizations--it consists of allowing workers to do work at times and locations that work for them--the CONTEXT for a flexible schedule is totally different.

In the first organization, flexible schedules are not the norm and they are based on a belief that the "best workers" are in the office, every day at specific hours. In the organization that embraces ROWE, however, flexible scheduling is part of the fabric and culture of the organization. It is based on a belief that the best workers will get their work done and that these workers NEED flexibility in order to operate at peak performance.

In the first organization, a flexible schedule is seen as a crutch for the "weaker" employees. In the ROWE organization, a flexible schedule is a tool that benefits all workers, particularly the strongest performers.

Why is making this distinction important? In part because I think that organizations interested in exploring the possibilities of ROWE must first be clear about some of their underlying beliefs about work and performance. Knowing if you see a flexible schedule as a crutch or a tool is an important first step.

Two Interesting Nonprofit Projects

Emerging from an unplanned blogging hiatus . . . A couple of interesting nonprofit projects came my way this morning via my Google Alerts.

The First Nonprofit IPO
In the for-profit world, an IPO is an "initial public offering"--the time the company sells stock to the public. Homeward Bound of Marin (CA) County is taking that idea into the nonprofit sector, launching their own IPO--an "Immediate Public Opportunity--to end homelessness. They've put up 200,000 shares at $32/share for anyone to purchase in support of their Next Key initiative. Warren Buffet bought the first share in what appears to be a carefully-crafted marketing campaign. Of course, the returns on this investment for the stock-buyer are not financial, so this is really a catchy way to fundraise. But a pretty cool idea for the Marin County area outside of San Francisco, which is a major IPO hotbed.

Philanthropy and Grantmaking Course Awards $4,000 to Local Nonprofits
Also from California comes this story about a Fresno State College class on Philanthropy and Grantmaking that participated in a hands-on learning experience in the grant funding process:

The class began the semester investigating needs in the community, identified two focus areas for funding (youth and housing), researched nonprofit organizations meeting those needs, developed a request for proposals and invited six select organizations to apply for funding. Students then evaluated and scored the proposals and oral presentations.

The award money was provided by a local foundation. A great way to learn about the grantmaking process.

NPTech Consulting 2.0

Michelle Murrain of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology is asking some thought-provoking questions about what she's calling "Nonprofit Technology Consulting 2.0":

What would it be like if we could help nonprofits with the following:

• Asking whether technology implementations in their organization in the past have really facilitated their mission? In what ways have they not?
• Asking whether technology played a beneficiary, damaging or neutral role in internal organizational dynamics and staff morale?
• Asking, before implementing a new technology - what problem is really attempting to be solved? is it a problem that can be solved in any other ways?
• How does increasing use of networking technology, on-line presence, and internet communications facilitate or hinder work that is done face to face?
• Making choices about technology not just based on cost/TCO or feature set - but to bring in issues of the effects on staff, organizational dynamics, and the role of factors such as organizational determination of data destiny, source and ownership of software, and environmental impact.
• Being mediators between vendors and nonprofits - to look at issues that are technological, and issues that are about personality, behavior and organizational structure and dynamics (on both sides)
• Looking at the bigger picture - how does what an organization does with technology affect the larger community, and the planet?

I'm looking for ways that it might be possible to practice nonprofit technology consulting with head and heart, with a view to the bigger picture of our society and our planet, and the precarious place we are in as human beings at this time, and with a view that reflects my emerging belief that increasing human touch and human contact will do more, in the end, than many of our attempts to increase efficiency by using technology.

It seems that what Michelle is asking is "Are we in a place where we're automatically assuming that technology is a good solution, rather than questioning our uses of technology each step of the way to ensure that there isn't some other way we should be accomplishing a task"? She wants to make sure that nonprofits use technology in ways that are mission-enhancing and sustaining, rather than as the pursuit of technology for its own sake.

I think these are great questions to be asking. I would add to this list a few more thoughts:

• If we select a technology solution, what organizational and managerial changes do we need to make in order to ensure that we achieve the objectives of the technology implementation? Michelle hints at this in a few of her questions, but I think it needs to be explicitly addressed. Too often I see technology used as an add-on to current organizational practices. Staff continue to do things as they did before, with any new technology solutions treated as additional work. There's no corresponding change in paperwork requirements or daily work habits, which often has the unintended consequence of making the technology a burden rather than a solution.

• How does this technology improve conditions for our primary customers? I've blogged before about this, and it's my belief that while we often look at how to use technology to manage fundraising and reporting, we tend to not consider how technology impacts our interactions with our core customers. I think we need to always be asking how we're using technology to improve their experience and if our uses of technology have a positive impact on the people we're meant to be serving. This means not only considering how technology chosen for other purposes impacts our customers (i.e., how does our case management software impact case management appointments?), but explicitly evaluating technologies to determine if they might not improve the experience for customers and empower them to do more things for themselves.

• In what ways does this technology support and facilitate human connection? Does it appropriately replace people-to-people interactions or does it make us more faceless and anonymous? I truly believe that many technologies can actually improve connection. Skype, for example, allows us to interact with people from around the world in ways we might not otherwise be able to do. At the same time, anyone who has been lost in voicemail hell can understand that technology also has the potential to leave us feeling alienated and alone in a world managed by machines. I've also seen implementations of technology (such as case management systems) that force staff to be tethered to a computer screen, overly concerned with entering data and minimally engaged with the flesh and blood person in the chair next to them. I agree with Michelle that there's a serious need to evaluate how technology either frees us to be more connected to people because it saves us time in some other realm, or how it enhances our ability to connect with people with whom we might not otherwise be able to form connections.

As someone who sees technology as a tool, rather than as an end in and of itself, I'm really glad to see Michelle asking some of these fundamental questions. This is the kind of dialog we need to ensure that technology in nonprofits is truly a mission-sustaining solution, rather than another burdensome requirement.

Is Your Focus on the Shortcuts or on The Journey?

Seth Godin has a great post on shortcuts:

Hey. It's not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what's good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that's worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it's easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.

There are some airlines that spend all their time dreaming up ways to lobby the government and others that spend all their time making flying a better experience. There are restaurants that dream up ways of charging more for bottled water, and others that work hard to create an experience worth bringing a group to enjoy.

It made me think about nonprofits and outcomes. There are organizations that get the outcomes funders require by manipulating data, focusing on documentation, finding the "easy" win. In my human services/employment and training corner of the world this means screening out the hardest to serve clients because they might not be successful. It means case managers more worried about documenting services  than they are about helping the client become self-sufficient and able to solve their own problems. It means "trolling for placements" (documenting people who found employment without you but can count toward your numbers) rather than actually providing services to help people find a  job. 

Then there are those organizations that don't go for the shortcuts. They focus on providing quality services as the right way to get to the destination. They put their energies into building staff skills, designing programs that work, figuring out what clients need and doing everything they can to give it to them. They know that they have to achieve outcomes, but they aren't going to take shortcuts to get there.

I know it's tempting to look for the quickest route to success, but particularly in the nonprofit arena I think this is seriously damaging. Unlike the for-profit world, we exist to achieve a mission, to do certain things to make people's lives better. When we take shortcuts, this is one of the most egregious betrayals of constituent trust that we can make. We are no longer about our missions but about what it takes to keep money coming in the door. In the for-profit world I think this is something we can live with--after all, companies exist to make a profit. But in the nonprofit world we negate our very reason for being when we focus on the shortcuts rather than on the journey.

More on Scarcity vs. Abundance Thinking

In between a grant proposal and a website I'm working on for a client, I've been continuing to think about the issue of scarcity thinking in nonprofits that I started on yesterday as I read what others have to say on the subject.

Allen points out that scarcity thinking is the enemy of change management everywhere, not just in relation to IT projects or nonprofits and I completely agree. He suggests that  good planning can help people adjust their scarcity beliefs, although I wonder if the right kind of planning is possible when management is in the grip of the scarcity mindset themselves.

Michelle Murrain of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology tells a story about a nonprofit she worked with:

A long time ago (in web years) I was working with a certain CEO of a certain chapter of a certain very-big-nonprofit (whose role in life is to fund other nonprofits - this kinda gives it away, but it's necessary for the story.) We were talking about whether or not this certain nonprofit, who had mondo resources, should help facilitate web development for their client organizations. They had realized that if they did that, the client organizations could begin to raise money themselves, instead of depending so heavily on this certain nonprofit. So, guess what? No web development help. I was, of course, surprised (that's mild, I was frankly horrified - wasn't it the mission of this certain nonprofit to help the client nonprofits raise money? Wouldn't helping them raise money themselves fulfill their mission?) But that's scarcity thinking for you. Even though this very-big-nonprofit was rolling in money, they thought the pie was finite, and that if the money didn't go through them, they'd get less. So the scarcity mentality isn't just for small, struggling nonprofits. It's very widespread.

What's sad and scary about this story is that the nonprofit she's talking about was "rolling in money," yet STILL saw the world in terms of scarce resources. It wasn't a picture based even on its own experienced reality, but on a world-view that I'm sure had never been challenged.

I have to wonder if one of the reasons we haven't seen as much progress as we'd like in achieving our various nonprofit missions is because of this scarcity mindset. Scarcity thinking allows us to make excuses for poor performance ("We don't have the time or the money or the people to do this!"). It isolates us, not only from other nonprofits with whom we might share resources and ideas, but from each other and from our clients. We're so busy maintaining our slice of the pie, we fail to see the ways in which we should be working on making the pie bigger. This scarcity mode is divisive and keeps us focused on the wrong things--on the problems and the barriers rather than on the opportunities and the solutions. I think it even moves us to keep clients dependent on us and our services, as Michelle's client did in the story above.

I've been looking at other resources too. This post from the Chief Happiness Officer is a good one, contrasting scarcity thinking and abundance thinking:

Scarcity	Abundance
It’s every man for himself	We can work together
I never have time	I take time for the things that matter
Mistakes are disasters	I can recover and learn from mistakes
Ideas are hard to come by and must be kept secret	I can always have a great idea
Our company is lacking	Our company has everything it needs to succeed
Look at all the resources we need	Look at all the resources we have
The market is full of threats	The market is full of opportunities
People are out to get me	People are out to help me

How often do we hear or see some version of the left column in our daily work? Far more frequently than we see the right column thinking, I'd guess.

I also found this post by Ross Mayfield who wrote last October about the issue of abundance and how he's spent the last five years blogging from that belief system:

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

I have discovered I have a lot to give.  And when I give, I notice others give more.  Some of them I've formed relationships with, and trust opens giving, but I have also learned to trust strangers to share in abundance.  Life is iterative, markets are not transactions and scarcity of attention is false. Our learnings compound abundance and there may be no limit to what we can produce.

I think that it's this picture of abundance that I find so engaging about the Internet and social media. A lot of people give generously of their time, their expertise and their support to write their own blogs, comment on others, create videos and podcasts and beautiful art that enriches the rest of us. And they do it for nothing.This is abundance thinking. This is a belief that there is an endless flow of ideas and information that we can connect and shape to create new things all the time.

I'm rambling a little, but it feels important to me to begin thinking differently about how I do my work. I know that I'm as guilty as anyone of scarcity thinking, especially under stress. Patricia Soldati talks about how fear drives scarcity thinking in her post on the "allure of scarcity":

(Scarcity thinking is) a powerful notion that's been with us forever, but has exploded in our consciousness since 9/11. Scarcity is rooted in fear and lives in the world of ego. It says: "The world is not safe, so I am not safe. I need to have greater and greater control to feel safe – over my health, my finances, my family, my work. If you have more, I have less."

Safe…maybe, but a scarcity mentality effectively embraces struggle, and abandons any opportunity for you to have a compelling identity about yourself, or to express your values or passions.

Scarcity is limiting, but safe and I think that most people value safety over just about everything (myself included, far more than I care to admit). So part of the challenge is to override your fear and to recognize when you've moved into that anxious scarcity mindset.

This kind of mindful practice is fine for individuals, but what about for an entire organization? It seems that we can only go so far in having individual people willing to challenge and re-formulate their belief systems, particularly if the leadership of the organization is not concerned with changing those patterns.

So the big question for me is what kinds of activities can organizations engage in to begin moving from scarcity to abundance?